The way (file content) merging works is, we attempt to do our textual merge, and if the whole files merge cleanly, then great. However, even if most of the file merges cleanly (including clean merges resulting from identical edits on both sides), even one conflicting hunk will cause this stage to fail.

If that stage fails, then we call the user's preferred merge tool, and just give it the left/right/ancestor files, and it gets to do the whole merge again from scratch, using whatever algorithms, heuristics, user interaction, whatever, that it is programmed with. It sounds like meld's are sucky when it comes to automatically resolving easy hunks so you can find the hard hunks that need your attention. There isn't any way for us to reach into meld's innards and tell it to automatically resolve certain hunks for you.

The only way we could do that would be by somehow programmatically generating some made-up "ancestor" file, in such a way that typical 3-way line-by-line merge tools that happened to use the same diff algorithm as monotone would magically find fewer conflicts. This is obviously complex, error prone, and it would workaround the limitations of dumb merge tools at the cost of making it impossible to create reliable smart merge tools (that really do just want to be told the facts on the ground, and then do whatever clever thing they know how to do).

Maybe it would be easier to fix meld so it could effectively "do the mindless clicking for you", automatically? I'm pretty sure both xxdiff and emacs' ediff-mode get this right, for instance.

Perhaps this is an artifact of my using meld for all my manual merging, however:

Whenever monotone presents me with 3 versions of a file I need to merge manually, one scenario occurs with great frequency, and its resolution requires absolutely no decision making on my part. This is the scenario:

The left descendant and the right descendant both have a change which has to go into the ancestor. However, the 2 versions of the change are identical in content.

Thus, I mindlessly click through 10s of such hunks. I cannot envision a scenario where you wouldn't want to merge something into the ancestor that both descendants have identically. After all, if, in the course of working on one of the descendants it is decided that the hunk is unnecessary, it will be removed, in which case the left and right descendants will no longer be "symmetrically different" from the ancestor.

My suggestion is that, before monotone offers the 3 versions of the file up for merging, all such "symmetrical differences" be automatically merged into the ancestor.

I was saying earlier that this may be an artifact of my using meld, because only in meld do I have to merge left and right descendant into the ancestor (this is a warning issued by monotone before running meld). Nonetheless, if the changes introduced in both the left and right descendant are identical to one another, IMO they can be merged before asking the user to decide on the rest of the changes.